← B2B Marketing Exchange
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- [00:00]
Shirin Araizi
What we see in reality in B2B marketing is that when we don't know what to do, we have this tendency as marketeers to fall back and assume that people are like Spock and they're rational. And so if I simply feed them more information about our features and solutions or more choices in our product, they'll do the right thing in choosing our solution. And that's the big challenge that we see here as that marketers face. But if we start really thinking of our user, even if it's a CC executive a little bit more like Homer Simpson, then what we can do is leverage all the great research that's been done in leading academia in terms of understanding decision making to lovingly nudge that Homer Simpson towards adopting our solution.
- [00:50]
Claudia Tirico
The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed.
- [00:59]
Kelly Lana
Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears.
- [01:02]
Claudia Tirico
I'm Claudia Tirico.
- [01:03]
Kelly Lana
And I'm Kelly Lana.
- [01:04]
Claudia Tirico
And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hey, everyone, we're back with another episode of the B2BMX podcast. We've got another two for one special for you today, a conversation with Shirin Araizi of Next Step, followed by the replay of her highly rated and highly engaging keynote talk. Today's episode is also a bit of a science lesson as Shirin will dive into the topic of behavioral science, which is essentially the study of how humans really make decisions. She'll share various behavioral science principles and how to apply them to B2B marketing. This is a really fascinating topic and our audience at B2BMX east really enjoyed the talk, so I'm really confident you will, too. I'll also be sure to include Shirin's LinkedIn page in our show notes so you could connect with her directly and maybe ask some questions of your own. With that said, let's roll the tape in three, two, one.
- [02:06]
Kelly Lana
All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. My name is Kelly Linds now, and we are once again on the show floor. So we have some fun little conference white noise going on around us, but today we're actually diving into something of a different topic than we typically cover, and that's behavioral science and its applications in B2B marketing. So I'm here with Shirin Orazi, founder and CEO of NextUp. Shirin, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you just tell your audience a little bit more about us and yourself and NextStep.
- [02:35]
Shirin Araizi
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. So I'm Sharon Araizi. I'm the founder and CEO of NextStep. We are a behavioral design agency based out of San Francisco. Largely work with clients nationwide, leveraging behavioral science insights. Largely. Think of it as the psychology of how your users are making decisions and applying that in the context of your marketing efforts, your product and customer experience.
- [02:58]
Kelly Lana
Perfect. So now, yesterday, you did host one of our opening keynotes. It was titled Behavioral the Human insights missing in B2B marketing. So let's just start with the basics here. What exactly is behavioral science?
- [03:09]
Shirin Araizi
I love it. So I'm gonna ask for permission to give you two ways of explaining it.
- [03:13]
Kelly Lana
Yes. Hit us with it. Hit us with it.
- [03:15]
Shirin Araizi
All right, I'm gonna give you the short version, which is behavioral science is really the study of how people really make decisions. And notice I emphasize that word really because we take into account your emotions, social factors, environmental factors, like a physical environment, like the conference that we're. Or a digital environment that your users might experience online. And we leverage that to understand how to get your users to make better decisions in the context of your products and solutions. So that was the short answer. The longer answer is one that I hopefully want your users to really think about as it relates to themselves, because I think it's really important to see sort of our own psychology and irrationality. So I'm gonna ask you to raise your hand. And I know we're on a podcast, but imagine raising your hand here if you have a generally a pretty good idea of what it takes to be.
- [04:06]
Kelly Lana
Healthy, I selfishly will say yes.
- [04:08]
Shirin Araizi
Yeah, exactly. So your fruits and vegetables, Fruits, veggies.
- [04:11]
Kelly Lana
Proteins, all that good stuff.
- [04:13]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [04:13]
Shirin Araizi
Get sleep, exercise a few times a week. Awesome. Now, if your hand is raised, I want you to keep it raised, and I want you to lower it. If you're ever guilty of any of the below. You were binge watching Netflix.
- [04:26]
Kelly Lana
Guilty.
- [04:28]
Shirin Araizi
I missed your morning workout. You grabbed the pastry when there was.
- [04:32]
Unknown Speaker
This apple right next to it.
- [04:35]
Shirin Araizi
Right. So what this example health illustrates is something that we can hopefully all relate to, that there's basically this gap between what we know we should do is don't binge watch Netflix, grab the apple. And what we actually end up doing, sleeping in, not working out, et cetera. And it's in closing this gap that behavioral science really shines because we take into account people's emotions, the environment, social factors, et cetera. And we lovingly like to think of our users and ourselves. Even in a B2B marketing decision, a little bit like more like Homer Simpson than Spock, we're not as rational as we like to think. And we really want to leverage our psychology and how we really make decisions to then get people to do the right thing. Adopt your product, solution, use it, and so forth.
- [05:26]
Kelly Lana
So this is so fascinating to me because in B2B marketing in particular, you know, everyone's very buttoned up. It's very formal, this, that. And again, you know, the shift is starting to come to, you know, you're marketing to people. People have lives. You need to empathize and understand them. So why is so important for marketing leaders to incorporate behavioral science into their work?
- [05:45]
Shirin Araizi
Yeah, absolutely. So I think what we see in reality and B2B marketing is that when we don't know what to do, we have this tendency as marketeers to fall back and assume that people are like Spock and they're rational. And so if I simply feed them more information about our features and solutions or more choices in our product, they'll do the right thing in choosing our solution. And that's the big challenge that we see here as that marketers face. But if we start really thinking of our user, even if it's a C suite executive a little bit more like Homer Simpson, then what we can do is leverage all the great research that's been done in leading academia in terms of understanding decision making to lovingly nudge that Homer Simpson towards adopting our solution. In the keynote, I gave a lot of examples of how we've leveraged that both on marketing adoption strategies for conferences and how do you generate leads, strategies for reducing churn, which can be a big problem in a B2B context.
- [06:47]
Kelly Lana
Awesome. So obviously it seems that behavioral science could have a huge impact on B2B marketing campaigns. So do you have any sort of examples or applications of behavioral science and B2B marketing you could share with us in our audience today?
- [06:58]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
- [06:59]
Shirin Araizi
So one of the things that we see a lot on is in terms of like marketing adoption and how you can leverage it to basically frame your solution in a way that's going to be much more appealing to users. So I worked through an example yesterday at the keynote, which was largely looking at your audience and understanding, are they what we call prevention focused or promotion focused? So a prevention focused people are always trying to prevent risk. Promotion oriented people are really thinking about what they can gain from something. And what's really interesting is that when we see people do B2B marketing we see a really big emphasis on messaging things, on this kind of promotion oriented way, like here's all the things that you can gain from using our solution, which is great and that's kind, kind of how we intuitively think. But in reality, many times we see in a B2B marketing decisions that people are actually concerned and fearful. They've used solution that hasn't worked and they really are much more trying to figure out how they can protect their company, their selves, et cetera. And so more prevention oriented languaging could actually far better in that context of adoption.
- [08:08]
Kelly Lana
Awesome. So now to the folks listening, let's say they listen to this podcast, super energized, ready to incorporate the behavioral science into their marketing. What kind of outcomes should they expect to receive from that?
- [08:18]
Shirin Araizi
Absolutely. So I think the short answer is from the work that we do with our B2B clients, we see increases anywhere from like 30% all the way to 300%. I think 890% was our like highest conversion, which we're really proud of. But that percentage honestly depends on where we're doing the interventions. Is it your top of the funnel on like, you know, social ads or LinkedIn? Was it further into the funnel? Are you a late stage enterprise company? The numbers are going to be lower likely or so it just varies quite a bit. And at a minimum we're looking at conversion increases of 15%.
- [08:57]
Unknown Speaker
Okay, I have two thoughts. Jason's talk was amazing and I want her boots. That was super awesome. So I'll be a little bit boring. I'll talk about science and behavior and whatnot. And to kick us off, I want to talk about how as behavioral scientists, we're always thinking about all the ways that as humans we act irrationally. And I'll start with my own go to irrational behavior. I suffer from what's called planning fallacy. If you invite me to an event that starts at 7:00, I'll probably show up at 9. Probably due to my Persian heritage, I was actually late to my own wedding. Yes, that is true. My husband was like, not so happy. Now maybe I'm irrational, but I'm sure you guys in the crowd are perfectly rational. But just in case, we're going to do a little survey. So I want you to raise your hand for me. And by the way, remember, I study you for a living so I know what happens. Raise your hand for me if you have generally a pretty good idea of what it takes to be healthy, eat your fruits and vegetables, exercise a few times a week, get your eight hours of sleep. Awesome. Keep those hands raised. Please drop them if you have ever been guilty of one of these things that I'm going to mention. You binge watched Netflix and didn't get your eight hours of sleep. Oh, my God, that's the whole crowd. Okay. Actually, there's like three people left. Okay, we'll keep going. You grabbed that sweet pastry at breakfast instead of the yogurt. Okay. No, they're still perfect. Here. You missed your morning workout because you slept in for the conference. All right, so there seems to be like two perfectly rational people in this room. I love it. What this example in health illustrates is something that hopefully we can all relate to. That there's basically a gap between what we know we should do. Eat our fruits and vegetables, exercise, get our sleep, and what we actually end up doing. Binge watching Netflix, skipping our morning workout, et cetera. It's enclosing this gap that behavioral science really shines. Because as behavioral scientists, we take into account that people's emotions, our environment, whether it's a physical one like the one we're in today, or a digital one that our customers and ourselves experience online and social factors. What are all the other people in this room doing? What are your peers doing? What are people in the industry doing? All influence our behaviors and our actions. And so we lovingly like to say that we think of our users on the other side and ourselves a bit more like Homer Simpson. We have biases and mental shortcuts and heuristics that lead us to the way that we make decisions. And we're not perfectly rational like Spock. But here's the challenge that we see in marketing our products and solutions. When we don't know what to do, we have a tendency to fall back and give people more information in our marketing and more choices in our product, and then expect a behavior. Do you think that if I gave you a bunch of pamphlets on the efficacy of exercise, that's what would get you out of bed or getting sleep? It would get you to click and turn off the Netflix. Sometimes, maybe, but not all the time. We're marketing in a digital age, but we've forgotten that we're relying on humans brains that hasn't really evolved in more than 200,000 years. Now, here's the good news. If we can find a way to understand all the ways that people are predictably irrational and document through research all the ways that we make irrational decisions, then we can actually take advantage of that and lovingly nudge our users and ourselves towards behaviors that are in our best interest and towards marketing our products and solutions in a much more effective way. Okay, I said all of that and I know what you're thinking, but really, our users are much more like Spock because they're executives and they're engineers. And so I put Homer in a suit for you and I was like, okay, I have to put AI in this somehow. And by the way, side note, I'd like to propose that anybody that says AI in this conference, we all jump down and do 10 pushups because AI might take our jobs, but at least we can look good at the end of the day. I went to ChatGPT and I'm like, okay, give me what are the top cognitive biases in B2B decision making? And it gave me 10. Actually, it gave me 20 and more. So if you have any doubts that we don't have biases in a B2B context, I like to offer things like confirmation bias, where we basically just look and search for information that just simply confirms our pre existing beliefs. This might be why we have such a political divide in this country. Or how about the herding effect? Have you ever noticed how the team and the company might herd around the opinions of the most senior people in the room? Right, okay. So hopefully, maybe I've convinced you a little bit that Homer Simpson exists in all of us, even if you are in suits and ties. Now, with that brief intro to behavioral science to really educate you, I'm not going to deliver a ton of content. We're going to actually play a game. We're going to play our science of design game, and I'm going to pair you in groups of two. I'd like to have you look at the table and find a person to pair with. We're going to do hopefully three rounds. I'm going to promise two rounds. And if they don't kick me off stage, we'll get to three rounds. We're going to be covering real life B2B marketing challenges that we've solved for our clients using behavioral science. And we're going to have you guys play with these concepts and hopefully by playing with these concepts, you'll start learning them. And by the way, there is some behavioral science in me having you play this game. I am trying to overcome, first of all, what's called your hindsight bias, which is if I simply come up here and show you a bunch of decks and a bunch of case studies, you'd be like, I could have done that myself. So I get you to play and maybe get it wrong, et cetera. Having guys talk with your teammate actually helps you improve cognition of the concepts that we're going to be covering today. That's a little bit of the behavioral science that's baked into our game. The game is going to be actually on your phones, on a mobile phone. I'm going to ask you just to wait when we go to the polling feature to pull up your phone and otherwise stay with your partner in conversation. I know I've got a phone I got to overcome here where you're not going into your phone and looking on LinkedIn, but I have full faith that your learning partner is going to help you overcome that desire to be on your phone today. So with that, do you have your learning partner? Are we good? Yes. Okay. I used to be a cycling instructor and yeah, I know when I wanted to get the crowd going, I'd have them like, hoot and holler. And I know it's a B2B context, but I'm going to get you guys to hoot and holler for every single round. And here's the situation. If you're not loud enough, I'm going to have to make you keep doing it again and again like a really annoying cycling instructor. So you might as well get it right. The first are we ready for round one? I will give you, on a scale of 1 to 10, that was about a 6.5. I'm going to ask one more time. I'd ideally like to get to like an 8.59. Are we ready for our first round? Yes. Okay, Here we go. First round. We are trying to increase B2B marketing adoption. Our client is a digital transformation consultancy. Largely what they do is they go into big Fortune 500 companies like Ford, et cetera, and then help bring digital solutions to their product portfolio. The challenge that you have as a marketeer is to figure out how do you increase adoption of these digital marketing services with B2B buyers at these enterprise companies? So their buyers are going to be chief innovation officers, chief technology officers, et cetera. And because we're scientists, we like to run experiments to understand what really happens. So we're going to run our experiment on LinkedIn across tens of thousands of actual buyers, our target audience in market. And we're going to be testing different messages to try to understand how to influence these buyers. So the first option is we go with what's called a loss frame message, or in behavioral science, it's part of what we call prevention messaging. And the general idea is that some Humans are much more motivated by preventing a negative outcome. So basically talking about what your product or solution protects me from or how I don't miss out on any information that's given in this conference. Second option is we go with what's called a gain framed message. So we actually talk about in behavioral science what we call promotion messaging. And the general idea here is because we're an innovation firm, let's focus on understanding how our solution can help our clients achieve more and what does our product enable them to do and how is it that I can maximize my learnings from this conference today? So if you're a promotion oriented person, you're going to respond more favorably to that, that frame of message. The third option is what I like to call keep it simple, stupid. Focus on clarity. It's one of the biggest problems that we see working with our clients in a B2B context is that they simply are not delivering the message clearly. So just focus on clearly defining the primary value prop of what you do. It's based on a complicated term. Leave it to scientists. We call it cognitive fluency. The general idea is that when we make things either through language or design or user experience, simple for people, it requires less mental work and it actually gets them motivated for that action. I'm going to very quickly explain the research that was done in the lab because I'm really hoping that you remember this one is really critical in B2B context. So they took a group of people, divided them in half, gave them the exact same set of instructions, and the only thing that they changed was the font. One as you see on the top is a simple font and the other is a cursive font. And they told them, tell us how much time you think it will take you to do these things. And people basically in the first scenario with a simple font, estimated 8 minutes. With just a cursive font, estimated 15 minutes. Why is this critical in a B2B context? Because when we overcomplicate talking about our solution, we make it feel to the user that using our solution is complicated and therefore they will be less likely to engage. So that's cognitive fluency. So back to your poll. I'm going to give you two minutes here to talk and I'm going to bring back our three options. So focus on a loss frame messaging, a gain frame messaging, or focus on the primary ballot prop with clarity. And off you go. All right, if you can hear me, clap your hands. If you can hear me, clap your hands. Okay, I was not a school teacher, but I figured. All right, cool. You guys ready to vote? So now I want you to flip your phones. Thank you so much for not being on your phones. And go ahead and cast your vote. Does anybody need the QR code? Yes, you do. Okay. Let's go back and give you a QR code here. All right. Votes cast? Yeah. All right, cool. Let's see what happened. Ha. I love it. Something really interesting happened that actually isn't the right answer. C what most of you got. Did you notice how I pre influenced you by talking about cognitive fluency a lot longer than the other concepts? That was actually not intentional, but that probably is something that led to that result. Let's talk about the answers. I'm going to go back here. Okay. Cognitive fluency or clarity on the primary value prop was our control condition. It was the client's best performing ad before we came along. When we came in and looked at what they were doing, they were actually using a lot of gain frame messaging in their website, in their marketing material. And intuitively that makes a ton of sense. And as marketeers, that is a default for us because we're typically bringing great innovative solutions to our clients where we think they can gain something out of using it. We weren't sure if this was the right frame, so we went out and talked to people, we talked to just a handful of their executives and something really interesting appeared where these people to us seemed very risk averse. They kept talking about how in the past, they've used solutions in the past and it's been highly disruptive. They haven't gotten good roi. And that led us to believe that we have a promotion prevention problem here where they are speaking to their audience in a promotion oriented way, but their audience is actually prevention oriented. So we ultimately put this actually out to test. We tested each of these concepts and the reason for that is because as scientists, we are firm believers on measuring real actual behavior where it happens on LinkedIn as opposed to pontificating on what might or might not be the answer. It turned out to be that in this scenario, the loss frame messaging that we were hearing in our qualitative interviews with executives actually held true at scale across tens of thousands of of CTOs, CIOs, et cetera. The reason this was really critical was because we now had quantifiable numbers to say we can go with the strategy of using loss frame messaging to gain adoption and notice. I want to call out something here. When I talk about loss frame messaging, it's not like doom and gloom, it's Very subtle. How do companies like Adidas, Microsoft and, and Ford. De Risk Innovation. That's it. And in the game frame, it's beat the competition that's going to appeal to somebody's promotion. So in reality the loss frame worked best and so you can see the results here. And so what did we do with that? We went back and redid all of their marketing, redid all of their messaging, infusing kind of this loss oriented message. I'm going to kind of pull out some things you see on their homepage. De Risk Innovation. Avoid revenue losses, prevent wasted money and damage to your reputation. Things that we knew were going to appeal to a prevention oriented person. And we ran the experiment now with all of their campaigns on LinkedIn. For three months we did LinkedIn prospecting, LinkedIn retargeting and paid paid search and we were able to generate quality leads for them. We then checked back in one year later after everything was live and they reported about a 10x return on their advertising spend. So it ended up working in terms of actually generating business for them. Now one thing I like to say here is that a lot of times when I give up principle, everybody is like, okay, we're all going to go and change all of our messaging to last frame because she said that in the conference. And I want to just say if you have a large enough audience, run the experiment to see what works for your audience and what doesn't. When we did this for a call center AI company, what we found was that there was actually differences in where the loss frame versus game frame worked. So actually the loss frame continued to work well at the higher level executive level, but with the more junior Personas, the gain frame worked. So if you're able to run the experiment, if you're not able to run the experiment on LinkedIn, at least go talk to five to 10 people that are your actual customers to engage what works best for them. All right, you guys know the drill by now. Are we ready for round two? Okay, that was like three. What the. I'm going to ask it one more time. I'd like to get us to 9.25. Are we ready for the next round? Okay, I'll take it. All right, our next solution or question is for an enterprise IT company, they do IT solutions and software. And the challenge that they had is a common challenge that we have in B2B marketing, which is that they were spending most of their marketing budget at events, but they were failing to generate a lot of qualified leads for their sales team. After the event. The common problem and the task at hand is how can we use behavioral science to motivate prospects that we meet at conferences to actually do a demo with our sales team after the conference. So option A is to use what's called regret lottery. Some people may have not. Does everybody know a regular lottery? Okay, cool. Does anybody know what a regret lottery is? Okay, cool. Nobody knows. We'll explain it. A regret lottery is actually similar to a traditional lottery, but then you add this element of loss or regret. The way that it works is that we basically told procecs here that, hey, we'll enter you in a lottery to win a brand new Tesla, but only if you complete a demo with our sales team. Does that make sense? The second option is use what's called pre commitment and then combine that with another behavioral science principle called hot state and I'll explain those and explain how we're thinking about it. So pre commitment is this tendency that we have as humans to basically make decisions that are better for our future selves right now. And so the idea with the pre commitment was to get prospects to basically pre commit to a demo at the event by filling out a mobile survey on their phone at the event. Then we combine that with what's called a hot state. And the idea with hot state or cold state is that basically people are much more likely to make a decision in a hot emotional state and than a cool state. So we right now in this room are all in a hot activated state because we came here intentionally. We're here to learn and network and every single day that passes after we leave this conference, we start getting cooler and cooler in terms of our tendency and motivation to want to change. So the goal here was how can we get the user when they're activated at the event to then fill out a form to sign up for a demo after the event. Third concept that we wanted to explore was this idea of time scarcity. And the general idea with time scarcity is that as humans, it's quite a powerful force in us where we tend to show greater desire when we learn that things are scarce. And if you're dealing a lot of times with people of different demographics, it could be time scarcity or financial scarcity. In this situation, what we're trying to do is say, hey, we're going to give you a clear deadline and a limited time to sign up up for these demos with our team and offer the fact that it's limited in nature. So I'm going to give you a minute and a half to Discuss options, and then we'll vote. All right, cool. You guys ready to see results? Votes in? Yeah. Cool. Pre commitment in a hot state. Wow. 70%. Okay, cool. So here's where I get to have my Oprah Winfrey moment. You're all winners. You're a winner, and you're a winner. And you're a winner because all three are correct. So we actually combined all three concepts. So here's how it worked. We wanted to get away from this idea of them spending money on trinkets and giveaways like notepads and whatnot at events, and instead took all of that budget that they were spending on that towards giving away one Tesla at the end of the year at VMworld, their biggest event. And so the entire year, we used this promotion and we were funneling leads to them, and then we had this massive drawing at VM World. Okay. So they didn't have to spend at every single event on trinkets and such. Not. So we wanted to use this, like, big lottery effect, knowing, and then tie it into this regret action of making sure that people did the vote. So the way the mechanics of it would work was people would come to an event, we would actually give them a quote that would only last for the day. So that's how we use time scarcity. We're saying we're giving you a code. It's going to only last for today, for you to use today on your mobile phone to schedule your consult with our sales team at some point in the future. And by doing that, you get entered into the lottery to win a Tesla. Here's the catch, though. You can't win if you haven't shown that you've completed the demo. There comes the regret part and there comes us closing the loop on getting them to do the actual demos. Because just coming in and scheduling on your mobile phone doesn't mean that you actually did a demo with the sales team. So once the sales team did a demo with you, then they would enter you in to have a chance to actually win the lottery. This ended up being so successful that we literally, their sales team, ran out of time of doing demos. So we started doing bigger group demos where multiple people could qualify at the same time. It ended up being their most successful marketing campaign in the history of the company. They actually won a Stevie Award for it, and we're so happy for them for that. And they were able to generate over 5,000 leads from this competition. It was so successful that they continued on with just different cars in the following years. So how is this relevant to you if you can't give away a Tesla? The other variations that we've done is taking instead of all the marketing budget the that's used on trinkets, we would get people to say that you could rent a Mini for a year, a Mini Cooper for a year. A lot less expensive than buying a Tesla. So there's ways that you can get creative in offering a higher value thing that people can use. All right, I think we're good to do our third round. If I don't get kicked off the stage, nobody's saying I'm going to get kicked off the stage. You guys ready for our third round? Okay, that's not fair because I haven't put the round slide on. When I do do that, I want a 10.65. I want us to go off the rector scale. Can we do that? All right, good. Okay, we're going to go now to the far end of the customer life cycle, which is customer retention. How can we use behavioral science to actually increase customer retention? So this client of ours is actually an educational technology startup. They didn't have an adoption challenge. They were actually in over 60% of the schools nationwide. Insane adoption. The problem was they were experiencing churn. People were buying the solution, not using it properly and then not renewing. So we needed to stop the bleeding. So here's the challenge. How do we make sure it school district managers who are our buyers, renew their software subscription. And the good news is because these are existing customers, we have their emails. So we're going to run our experiment on email. This is across tens of thousands of users. Again, they have great adoption, lots of customers and we're going to test a clarity. It's back again. So cognitive fluency and how we're testing it is in the language that we're using in the subject line and the body of the email, et cetera. We're just simply explaining what the dam software does. Yes. It's not rocket science. Just give it to me simply what is it that you do and why should I keep using it? The cognitive fluency. We've already covered this. B Pure social proof. So talk about how people like them are using this. Well, and this is based on a behavioral science principle called social proof. I'm sure every single marketing person knows this. We as humans are quite motivated by what others people around us do. There's actually three types of social proof that influences as humans. There's peer social proof, which is what we did in this case. So people like me Companies like me, other school districts like me, are using this solution successfully. There's expert social proof, people that I admire, influencers, et cetera, are doing this, and so should I. And there's numbers social proof, which is like, many people are doing it. Think of McDonald's. Billions and billions of people served. So we used peer social proof here to say, hey, your peers are doing it. And the third concept we're testing for is the endowment effect. And basically talking about the fact that you've already got all kinds of tech. And so that. But endowment effect is this idea that as humans, we basically value products and services that we already feel ownership to more than those that we don't. So the actual experiment in the lab that was done was they took a group of people, basically gave half the group of people a mug to hold for a period of time, and then asked what they would be willing to get paid for to part with it. And if you just merely held the cup of mug in your hand for more minutes than somebody else, you were willing to part with it for more dollars. So basically, the idea here is you already own this tech. You've already invested in this tech. You haven't used it successfully. Let us show you how you can use it successfully. All right, we got a minute on the clock, and your time starts now. All right, if you can hear me, clap your hands. Awesome. Let's vote. By the way, B is pure social proof. Okay, let's see what happened.
- [39:29]
Kelly Lana
Yes.
- [39:30]
Unknown Speaker
Endowment effect. Good job, guys. That is the winner. You're becoming behavioral scientists. Well done. Okay. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about this clarity. The reason we chose clarity is when we went out there and looked at how they were talking about their software solution and then talked to IT school district managers, it became very clear that people were still super confused around what their tech does. And so the idea of just explaining more clearly what does this solution do was our hypothesis for what we wanted to test social proof. When we went out and talked to the IT school districts, we noticed this tendency. When we talked to them about other solutions, they talked about how they would follow what other school districts were doing that led us to believe that pure social proof might be going on. Endowment effect was just us using behavioral science skills. It wasn't something somebody was saying, but we know that it's a powerful motivator. And in humans, that when we have a sense of ownership towards something, we have this tendency to not want to part with it and lose it. And so we wanted to kind of test that out. Fun fact, you don't see this here, but their executive team had very successfully scaled the company using a lot of aspirational message in their marketing early on. And so they really were gung ho about us testing aspirational message. And we were like, no problem. So there was actually a fourth condition that was aspirational messaging that we tested to see if that could get people to renew. And across all the metrics that we measured, the endowment effect ended up working the best. And the nice thing was that the executives we were able to quantify and prove for them while the aspirational message was working, in some cases it wasn't working consistently. All right, well, now comes the fun part. I think we have everybody's contact. We're going to enter you into guess what? A lottery for a chance to win a behavioral science consult with our team. And for everybody that participated in our session today, we're going to send you a link to curated behavioral science principles that we use specifically in B2B marketing. And to close, I hope that you'll remember if you end up struggling at any point to get the results that you want from your efforts, maybe, just maybe, you might be marketing to Spock when you should be marketing to Homer Simpson. Thank you so much.
- [42:11]
Claudia Tirico
Okay, guys, that's a wrap on Shirin and today's science lesson. I hope these talks gave you a better understanding of how behavioral science is mission critical for a successful B2B marketing strategy. So big shout out to Shirin and her team for sharing their expertise on the subject and joining us at B2BMX East. Thank you all so much for tuning in. There's plenty more in store for the remainder of the season, so be sure to subscribe to the POD so you don't miss out on any new episodes. And if you have any feedback or questions, check us out on LinkedIn and let us know what's on your mind. We're inching closer and closer to the B2B Marketing Exchange event in Scottsdale, Arizona, and our listeners get a special discount code to attend. So peep the show notes for more information. You definitely don't want to miss out on this year's incredible agenda. So that's it for me as well. Thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your week and we'll catch you on next Wednesday.